Flow Concept

The concept of the flow is central to the design of CA CPM. A flow is a series of jobs identified by a unique eight-character name. A flow can consist of a few jobs grouped under a single schedule or thousands of jobs encompassing multiple schedules.

Flows are defined in the scheduling product whether it is CA Workload Automation SE, CA Jobtrac, or CA Scheduler. You define each flow by identifying the starting and ending jobs. CA CPM dynamically uses the starting and ending jobs to build the list of jobs in the flow as well as the predecessor and successor relationships among these jobs.

When a change in job status occurs (such as when a job starts, ends, or abends), the scheduling product detects it and generates a CAIENF CPM event. This CPM event is passed to the CPM Server task. If the CPM Server task is not active, the CAIENF event is recorded in the CAIENF database so it can be passed to CPM Server task later when it becomes active.

A flow name can be shared between different job management products on the same system, or by copies of the same job management product on different systems. However, the same flow name cannot be used by two copies of the same job management product on the same system. For example, CA CPM can track two CA Workload Automation SE flows with the name PAYFLOW1 if one copy of CA Workload Automation SE runs on system A and the other copy runs on system B.

The CA CPM ISPF Interface can display the status of the flows and jobs that CA CPM is monitoring. The information available includes CA CPM estimate of when each flow will complete, based on the historical information retrieved from the controlling job management product. You can also display the current critical path for each flow, display other paths, and interact with the CA CPM Server task.